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Interoute Virtual Data Centre operates two zones inside Switzerland, Geneva and Zurich, which means that it is possible to create resilient cloud applications for which all your data and computation remain inside Swiss borders. In this blog post I demonstrate the use of the Private Direct Connect network functions of VDC to connect networks and virtual machines in the Zurich and Geneva zones. These machines can then be used in many ways to replicate or backup data, or to build distributed applications. As a demonstration of the latter, I will set up a master-slave pair of MariaDB database servers.

Hybrid cloud is the optimal solution today for most companies' IT requirements, involving a combination of private compute and storage, and public cloud infrastructure. Online retailing is a good example of highly variable demand, where it makes sense to 'own the base and rent the spikes'. A hybrid solution requires a high performance network to perform well, but even the fastest network can leave you squeezed by network latency and struggling to provide the responsive online experience that your customers expect. By taking away the time costs of network latency using the distributed compute zones of Interoute Virtual Data Centre, you can gain time and options to improve your online business strategy.

Interoute has achieved a double success by being placed as a leader and the most visionary among all of our competitors in Gartner’s 2015 assessment of "Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting in Europe", as well as being selected as the only European-based provider in Gartner's "Infrastructure-as-a-Service Magic Quadrant, Worldwide". This supports our claim for Interoute now being the only Global European cloud provider, and is a validation of our company's strategy of offering the best networked cloud platform, Interoute Virtual Data Centre, combined with our long-standing expertise in providing infrastructure for enterprise IT.

In a recent upgrading of Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC), we have added some new functions to create and control the different types of networks available. This post looks at 'Private Direct Connect' networks in VDC, which provide high bandwidth and low latency networking between VDC zones, and demonstrates a few simple applications of how they can be used.

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 will become an unsupported product on 14th July 2015. This blog post describes how Interoute Virtual Data Centre can help to make easier the migration of your infrastructure to the cloud.

April 1st is the ideal day to talk about network standards! The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) oversees the standards for the Internet, which are published in documents titled 'Request for Comments' or RFC. Every April Fools Day, the IETF publishes one or more spoof RFCs: the goal is to create a document that is plausible yet satirical, absurd, or even surreal.

This post gives a hands-on demonstration of geographic redundancy for a database application, by building a replica set with the MongoDB database. The fast, private MPLS VPN network of Interoute VDC is used to connect virtual machines in London and Amsterdam.

Classic public cloud services, unlike the distributed applications that they serve, are seemingly stuck at an earlier stage of evolution. They are tied to a model which separates the massive pools of compute from the "dumb network" that connects the pools to each other, or to users. For developers to gain all the advantages of working with containerised services such as Docker requires a "smart" network. Interoute Virtual Data Centre is an alternative to classic cloud which delivers the smart network by integrating compute pools into a high-capacity, low latency global backbone network.

The digital transformation is changing the ways business is done and how society operates. Amidst all of this change, the retail banking sector (personal bank accounts and savings, personal loans and small business loans) has been curiously slow to change. Where banks have not innovated, new "digital only" entrants are entering the market with innovative services. The Internet has established a dynamic playing field, which will surely challenge the traditional business models of banking.

This post shows how to use Python with the Virtual Data Centre API to extract and manipulate information about VDC networks. The information can be processed by a diagram tool called 'nwdiag' to produce visual network diagrams. With a modest amount of Python code it's possible to create a useful enhancement to the standard VDC interface.